In 2011, the biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in
Japan. Soon after the nuclear accident, a video appeared on YouTube in which a rogue power plant worker walked
towards one of the site’s CCTV cameras and pointed to its centre while watching his own image being streamed ...

In 2011, the biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in
Japan. Soon after the nuclear accident, a video appeared on YouTube in which a rogue power plant worker walked
towards one of the site’s CCTV cameras and pointed to its centre while watching his own image being streamed live on
his smartphone. Despite it clearly being a reinterpretation of Centers, the 1971 performance by Vito Acconci, this essay
argues that the Fukushima reenactment not only questioned the cultural paradigms that grounded Acconci’s original
gesture, but also signaled the urgent need for humankind to reconsider its own ontological and epistemological grounds
in the face of imminent extinction. By comparing Vito Acconci’s Centers with its Fukushima reenactment, the essay
tells the history of Modernity and of its failure as a project of human emancipation, grounded on a fantasy of human
mastery of ‘Nature.’